INTRODUCTION.

ff. 11, 12, of which one contains an ancient text from the LXX. Septuagint, and the other, being paper, has not been palimpsested, have been inserted between quires II. and III. I have detected no quire marks. It is impossible to say how many leaves the book originally contained, as the beginning and the end are both lost, 162 leaves being now extant. The arrangement of the leaves will be best understood from the table on pp. xxx—xxxiv.

Some remarks on the text of the Protevangelium and the Transitus.

In my transcription I have not always been able to see whether the seyyame two dots indicating a plural points which indicate the plural have been written over a letter. It is frequently impossible to detect these in a palimpsest, owing to the place where they would naturally occur being covered by the later writing. In no case have I printed seyyame points where I did not actually see them; but that is no reason for assuming that they are not there in other cases; and I have therefore frequently translated a noun as plural because it is so in Dr Wright's text; or for the still better reason that it is furnished with a verb or a pronoun in the plural.

Where the text of my palimpsest failed, through the loss of a few leaves, I have supplied the deficiency from a manuscript lately brought from Tûr Abdîn in Mesopotamia by my friend Dr Rendel Harris. This bears, as will be seen, a very late date, A.D. 1857. Its copyist is probably still alive; but the manuscript which is its immediate parent must be a very excellent one; seeing that it follows both my own ancient text and that of Dr Wright so closely that I need offer no apology for fitting together two texts which have a decided affinity with each other. I have not tried to give the variants from Dr Harris' MS., because they are certainly later than my own text; but I have indicated throughout where its pages begin. Dr Nestle has called my attention to an extract from the Protevangelium Jacobi in Dr Sachau's Verzeichniss der Syrischen Handschriften in Berlin Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in Berlin, Vol. II. p. 676, which is evidently the same version as mine, although at the end of Chap. XII. it makes Mary 12 years of age instead of 16.

Page ܐ 1 l. 6. In Cod. Harris f. 95 a we have ܡ̈ܠܬܗܘܢ their words for ܡܠܬܗܘܢ their word, from ܐܡܠܠ Aphel/causative of to speak of ܡܠܠ to speak.